St Sukie De la Croix

"For three decades, St Sukie de la Croix, 72, has been a social commentator and researcher on Chicago's LGBT history. He has published oral history interviews, lectured, conducted historical tours, documented LGBT life through columns, photographs, humor features, and fiction, and written the book Chicago Whispers (University of Wisconsin Press, 2012) on local LGBT history. St Sukie de la Croix, the man the Chicago Sun-Times described as “the gay Studs Terkel,” came to Chicago from his native Bath, England, in 1991. He has had columns in local publications or online news and entertainment sources such as Chicago Free Press, Gay Chicago, Nightlines/Nightspots, Outlines, Blacklines, Windy City Times, and GoPride.com, as well as numerous others outside the city. In 2008, he was a historical consultant and an on-screen interviewee for the WTTW television documentary Out & Proud in Chicago. In 2005 and 2006, he had two of his plays, A White Light in God’s Choir and Two Weeks in a Bus Station with an Iguana, performed by Chicago's Irreverence Dance & Theatre Company. A popular and engaging lecturer, he has spoken at various venues, from Chubb Insurance to Boeing and from Horizons Gay Youth Services to the Chicago Area Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce. His crowning achievement came in 2012 when the University of Wisconsin published his in-depth, vibrant record of LGBT Chicagoans, Chicago Whispers: A History of LGBT Chicago Before Stonewall. With a foreword by noted historian John D’Emilio, the book received glowing reviews. It cemented de la Croix's deserved position as a top-ranking historian and leader. In 2012, de la Croix was inducted into the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame. Two years later, he moved to Palm Springs, California, and in 2017, he published The Blue Spong and the Flight from Mediocrity, a novel set in 1924 Chicago, followed by The Orange Spong and Storytelling at the Vamp Art Café in 2020. In 2018, he published The Memoir of a Groucho Marxist, a work about growing up Gay in Great Britain, and in 2019, Out of the Underground: Homosexuals, the Radical Press and the Rise and Fall of the Gay Liberation Front. Also, in 2019, he published St Sukie’s Strange Garden of Woodland Creatures with celebrated illustrator Roy Alton Wald. In 2019, St Sukie de la Croix and Owen Keehnen launched their Tell Me About It Project, which led to the 2019 publication of Tell Me About It, Tell Me About It 2, and in 2020, Tell Me About It 3. St Sukie continued his LGBTQ Chicago history series in 2021 with the publication of Chicago After Stonewall: A History of LGBTQ Chicago from Gay Lib to Gay Life, picking up the narrative of the Chicago LGBTQ rights movement from where his first history book, Chicago Whispers, left off. It follows the movement from the day after the Stonewall Riots in New York through to the formation of the Chicago Gay Liberation Front to the publication of Chicago’s first regular gay newspaper, Gay Life. His latest history book is, Last Call Chicago: A History of 1001 LGBTQ-Friendly Taverns, Haunts & Hangouts, with author Rick Karlin. St Sukie also created the Twilight Manors in Palm Springs series, with Twilight Manors in Palm Springs God’s Waiting Room (book 1); Twilight Manors in Palm Springs: The Strange Case of Donna Reed’s Missing Wig (book 2); Twilight Manors in Palm Springs: The Peculiar Case of the Follies Dancer (book 3); and now the fourth book in the series Twilight Manors in Palm Springs: The Lady in Gray & The Bessie Mae Diamond. The series follows the adventures of Brian and Stéphane as they continue to bring madness and mayhem to Palm Springs.

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